He didn’t think it was.
Yet, he hadn’t a choice.
No, Lord Robert Phillip Clarence, Duke of Brighton, was not happy.
And he did not wish his mother or his sister to know.
No one could know.
Those who frowned upon the riches that were bestowed upon them were rarely shown compassion. He had all that a man could dream of having, an infinity more than most would ever have, and he did not appreciate it? There would be protests outside his gates if it were ever made known.
No, his family could not know about what he did when he was on his own. It was one of his few rules. There were just some things that his mother could not know about. Robert’s unhappiness was his secret, one that he had kept so well. But, while he had kept the truth hidden from his mother, he had never lied to her. And he didn’t wish to begin now.
But how else would he explain his present attire without the truth? What other reason could he give for dressing the way that he was?
As there was little else in the way of entertainment in the country to distract his mind from the thoughts that rioted, he couldn’t bear parting with this secret.
And then there was the matter of the girl’s wishes to consider. She did not wish to be taken to the castle just the same as he did not wish to take her there. In fact, she was quite adamantly opposed to it, even given her state.
He didn’t believe her protest that she did not want to be an imposition—that wasn’t what made her nearly jump out of her skin at the mere mention of the castle. There was something else. Perhaps she’d had a romance with one of his servants and it had ended badly. She was so pretty, even in her faded, thread-bare navy dress and her messed hair, that lying disheveled on the ground Robert couldn’t conceive of why any man would ever let her get away from him.
But such thoughts were not for him.
He may not have been dressed as such but he was far above her station. He was a duke, the Duke of Brighton, and she was a nobody. It didn’t matter that her beauty not only equaled but surpassed every woman’s in the ton, their match would never be accepted. People stuck to their own.
But oh, this girl was beauty incarnate, and she was pressed to him, the side of her breast pushing against his chest. He had to force himself to breathe steadily, to keep his composure, for her presence, and her touch, had him feeling like a green boy ready to burst.
Chapter 4
He was at the stables within minutes, passing her limp body down to an actual stable hand who appeared out of the woodwork. Dismounting, Robert instructed the lad to call him by Robert only, continuing on with the charade his attire had initiated as he took her back into his arms.
He laid the girl down upon a bed of straw and clean horse blankets, sending the boy to the house for water, ice and linen, under strict instructions not to mouth a word of what had transpired. The young man was back within minutes with the requested items in hand, and Robert set to work, dabbing at her temple with a wet cloth, removing the blood and revealing a cut that, while significant, Robert judged would not require stitches. Though, the fact that she was not awake worried him beyond measure.
Still, hours later, he hesitated.
Seated beside her, Robert chewed his lip, watching the rise and fall of her chest, waiting for her to awaken, each second growing more and more anxious, wondering if he should send for the doctor or wait, bring her inside or keep her hidden away.
His heart was beating unsteadily, his palms damp from the sweat of indecision.
It was foolish, irresponsible to keep her here. What if she died? What if she was dying right now while he sat beside her dabbing her forehead with a cool cloth, taking in the slow rise and fall of the dress stretched tight across her chest? As his eyes roamed her body, desire tightening in his gut, she could be slipping further from life.
Robert’s mouth instantly dried.
He should send for a doctor. Now, before it was too late. As it was, nearly two hours had already passed and she hadn’t so much as flinched or flickered her eyes open. She showed no signs of awakening. He was no man of medicine, but surely that was not a good sign.
He wiped the back of his shirtsleeves across his brow, relocating the perspired manifestation of his anxieties.
He was being reckless, as he often was, but this time someone else’s life was hanging in the balance. He couldn’t afford to be selfish. Or, more like, she couldn’t afford for him to be selfish. He needed to send for the doctor. There was no choice in the matter, could be no concern for putting his wants over her needs. He needed to bring her inside and hope that she survived this ordeal.
“Reggie,” he barked, calling over the stable hand.
Robert shifted, moving to stand so that he could better pick her up, when he heard the sweet, sharp inhale from beside him. He snapped his attention back to her face, registering the girl’s alarm as her eyes went wide and her mouth clenched shut.
She moved to sit up immediately. His staying hand stilled her progress. Robert watched her head sway, her eyes momentarily losing focus, before she consented to the will of his hand, lying back onto the bed of hay. She closed her eyes in an expression of pain, her forehead clenched, her lips gently open in a look of distrust.
He was drawn to those lips.
Those lips were perfectly kissable.
He could not do it. It would be entirely wrong. Besides, the girl was in pain.
“Are you alright, miss?” he asked for the third time that day.
Her eyes snapped open again, and she stared up at him with wild bewilderment and… Well, and something else he could not immediately discern. She looked over his shoulder, then to her side, and he saw the fear multiply in her eyes.
The girl’s exhale was almost unheard, and when she spoke she sounded breathless. “Where am I?”
Robert opened his mouth to speak, but the words were caught inside. Even breathless this girl spoke with such perfection it was unbelievable. It was not the accent of a simple country girl. Who was she?
Finally, his mind focused back on the question at hand and he answered. “The stables at Brighton Castle. You expressed that you did not want to be a hindrance to the family and I could not simply leave you in the state you were in.”
“And the master. Does he know?”
Robert paused again, considering how to answer, while simultaneously curious as to her fascination with the duke. Though, why wouldn’t she be fascinated? She was an attractive young miss and dukes were considered all-powerful. Of course she would be interested in the duke. Everyone was.
However, hers was not merely interest. There was something else entwined with her inquiry—an emotion he could not rightly name.
“I have not been inside since we arrived,” Robert answered, carefully evading the truth. It was not an outright lie, he told himself, and so he refused to feel the guilt that tried to present itself.
Really, she was a nobody. He was not obligated to tell her the truth. And yet, he wanted to. He absurdly wanted to tell her all of his secrets. He wanted to open up to someone, finally, to lay himself bare before her and let her clothe him. He didn’t wish to lie.
But it wasn’t a lie. Not really.
Robert watched the girl chew on the corner of her lower lip for a long moment. She was staring over his shoulder again, out the open door where the afternoon sun of early April beamed in, promising a pleasant day. When she caught him staring, she stopped, releasing her reddened lip.
After another minute of silence stretched out between them, she said, “I think I’m well enough to sit.” Her tone implied there was no putting her off. It was a tone that reminded him somehow of his mother, which should have increased his anxiety—for what could this girl possibly have in common with his mother? Instead he found it oddly comforting.
He gave her a quick nod, relenting, and placed a hand on her shoulder should she feel faint and require his assistance. That was the only reason for the touch; not because he was still reveling in
the feel of her on his lap and wishing for the contact with her soft heat once more.
However, he found that she did not require his assistance and removed his hand from her warmth as soon as she was upright. He flexed his hand at the sensation that prickled there as he reached for a tumbler. He refused to be so affected by a female. He was a man in control and would not be brought down by a damsel. And certainly not one in distress.
“Water?” he asked with the crisp voice he had perfected over the years, a mechanism for keeping his emotions at bay.
“Please,” she said in return, the soft melody of her words cutting through his exterior as he passed her the glass of cool water.
“What is your name?” she asked politely, after raising the cup to her lips and taking a dainty sip.
There was a slight pause while he considered this, before he answered, “Robert.”
It is not a lie, he consoled internally.
“Robert,” she repeated, his name innocence on her lips, which of course made him think of her saying things far less innocuous. “Thank you for your assistance,” she said, drawing his eyes, and his mind, away from her lips and back to her words. “It was most kind.”
He nodded in acknowledgement, though the motion was jerky. Because really, how did one just forget those lips? The dusty pink skin curved in such a way that would leave any man salivating. They did not require painting for them to be more alluring than the most skilled of prostitutes.
His own lips parted, his tongue wetting them as he continued to consider hers. Or rather, as he tried desperately not to consider hers.
“It was my pleasure, Miss—” he left the sentence a question for her to finish, his voice just as stiff as too many other portions of his body.
Luckily, she seemed ignorant of his unease. She was consumed by her own apparent inner chaos. She looked to the ground at her feet, then back up, across the barn—anywhere but at him. She was nervous and clearly resisting the urge to chew on her lip, the lip that he wished to chew on himself.
Robert fisted his hands as he watched the words flow off her tongue, between her lips, swirl around the air between them, until finally, the perfect sound consumed his ears. “I’ve always wanted to be called Rose,” she said to the wall.
“A very beautiful flower.” Fitting, he thought.
“Yes,” she answered. If he were still looking at her eyes perhaps he would have noticed, but he was looking at her lips and, by the time he registered in her tone what he believed to be resignation and moved his gaze to her eyes, whatever emotion had been in the word was gone.
“I thank you most sincerely for abiding by my wishes, Robert. I would hate to have been an inconvenience to the family.”
He watched her carefully as she spoke, searching for a hint of what she was feeling. But there was nothing beyond perfect civility in her tone and her demeanor, and Robert began to wonder if he had imagined the heaviness in the word she had spoken before.
No.
It was there. It had to have been.
“As I said, it was my pleasure. However, I must ask, why were you lying in the middle of a public path? Did you have a fall?”
Then the most wonderful sound pierced the air as the girl’s polished exterior gave way and she chuckled softly to herself. There was something sad about it, something restrained, as though it were not something done naturally, or willingly even. But the hint of joy disappeared as abruptly as it had come.
She was staring down into the glass she held in her hands, and Robert found himself searching for that laughter in her face, but the short-lived mirth had vanished to whatever mysterious place it had come from. Her face held no emotion. It should have been frightening, and perhaps he should have endeavored to find out why it was that she could so quickly show a piece of herself, and then so promptly and effectively disguise it again. Instead, Robert was transfixed by the way her gold lashes fanned out on her cheeks as she stared down into the transparent liquid.
“There was a particularly alluring swath of sunlight right there,” she explained, her voice once again low and even, and just as impassive as her face, “and I could not resist bathing in it. It was foolish.”
Robert could not help but smile. Was it merely her beauty? Or was it something else, something more, something deeper that drew him to her? It seemed that there was much more to her than what met the eye. As though he only saw what she allowed him see.
He wanted to see her completely. Just as completely as he wanted her to see him.
But you don’t even know her. The words whispered through him like a curse, begging him to end this torture.
Even as he knew he should pack her into a carriage and send her home to her waiting father, he spoke again, and they were not the words of farewell. “You do not see the sun very often, I take it,” he said. Then, adding almost immediately—upon realizing that one doesn’t remark upon noticing the shade of one’s skin or or the lack of callouses on one’s hands, and certainly not with strangers—“Pardon me for noticing, but your… complexion is quite pale for the daughter of a farmer.” He was making a hash of it. Gentlemen did not say such things.
Of course, he rarely acted as a gentleman should, and he most certainly was not playing the part of a gentleman just now. Now, he was treading in new, completely foreign territory, and he was without a map.
He had to stop himself, hand in midair, from rubbing the pale skin of her cheek. He jerked his hand back, shocked by himself at what he had nearly done.
This girl was not for him.
Luckily, Rose seemed unaware of the inner and outer turmoil she was casting him into. She wasn’t so much as looking at him. And if she perceived his plight, she gave no indication.
She also didn’t deny his assumption. Daughter of a farmer she was. Below his class, entirely outside his station, unworthy of his notice. It was cruel to be so attracted to her.
“Oh,” she stammered, shock resonating in her tone, which made Robert’s fallen smile widen. She was injured and alone and trying to hold it together, and finally she was showing a crack, an imperfection. It made her perfection even greater, and the devil in him wanted to exploit the weakness.
It was a weakness of his own.
“I, uh—My Mama, that is, was always very strict in her instruction that I must stay indoors and away from the sun. She had higher aspirations for me than most.”
“She sounds like a very devoted mother,” Robert remarked. Her mother clearly cared deeply for her, would do anything for her daughter.
They had that in common.
Robert had the strangest desire to lean in as he waited for her reply. Kiss her, his body and mind screamed in unison. But the girl didn’t answer his remark. Instead, something turned cold, sad, dead in her eyes. She quickly blinked it away, replacing it with what Robert could only guess was meant to allude to a smile, which she set upon him. The corners of her lips were tight and just barely lifted. It was hardly a smile at all, and yet there was something mesmerizing about it that did not allow his eyes to shift from her lips.
The smile was hesitant.
It was the smile of a temptress who didn’t know her powers.
She was perfection.
But she couldn’t be. He couldn’t allow her to be.
She was innocent, pure. He could smell it on her. She deserved more than what he wanted desperately to give her.
Damn, he wanted to kiss her.
“What is your story, Robert?” Rose asked, and he allowed for the change in topic as his body strained against his roaming thoughts. He only wished for more emotion than what she put into the query. It was as though she were discussing the weather over tepid tea in a drafty drawing room. It was almost distasteful.
How could he be so consumed by her, and she be entirely unaffected by him? It seemed there was a law of nature being broken. Not that he was a vain person, but it was hard to ignore the face on the body he had inherited, and he knew that it was even harder for the fairer sex to dis
regard it.
He may have been trying not to want her, but was it so much to ask that she show some interest in him?
Rose’s voice pulled him back from the recesses of his mind, as she continued, “You know my story now. Daughter of a farmer and strict mother. It’s only fair that I know yours.”
Robert cleared his throat. Then he cleared it again, flustered by her inquisition. He wasn’t used to being prodded by people he didn’t know. He was a duke after all and the title alone did well to silence those beneath him. And if it didn’t, his mastered icicle stare reminded them of their place. And his.
He was a duke, born and bred. And with that came responsibility. He must care for those beneath him, must show his gratitude and concern for his people, but they were not his friends. They couldn’t be. He had his family and a handful of friends—fellow aristocrat sons he’d met while in school and whom he’d raised hell with in London—but he had no one that truly knew him, understood him.
His life was rather lonely, come to think of it. Not that he dwelled upon the fact. He made sure to fill all his time with drink and gambling and women, only giving up the clutches of those vices to attend to his mother and sister. In the years since he graduated he’d spent far too much money, and far too much time, blitzed.
But he wasn’t blitzed now. Now he was in the country, sober as no man in his particular situation wanted to be, seated next to the most beautiful girl—a girl he could never have. And he was lonely. For the first time in his life he had been forced to stop his mad dash of hedonism and self-gratification, and the perspective it suddenly gave him was frightening.
He always knew what was to be, that he was to marry Lady Rosalyn. That was why he drank. He drank to forget his future, to live in the moment. But now, as he sat beside this beautiful girl, he realized that he hadn’t lived at all. All those women, all that drink, and what did he have to show for it? A couple of mates that he could call upon at any time for a night of sin—not friends he could open up to, friends he could share his demons with.
Rose by Another Name Page 3